Paintings
Installations / Sculptures








Hedge and Boundary Wall of the House I’m Leaving

Shown at Thames-Side Studios Gallery in London October 2nd to October 19th, 2026 as a part of Falsework Group Show.    
I made this piece while moving out of my home of the past six years. Through this process, I became very aware of how so many ordinary things were beginning to transform into a state of nostalgia. I started to notice things I had previously taken for granted, like my boundary wall. When I look at it now, I become more aware of everything that has happened within those walls over the past few years. Memories begin to feel solid.

The piece is covered in mayflies. As a fly that is known to live in post-larval stage for only a day, I see the mayfly as floating between the past and present. For me, this short emergence reflects the way memories can suddenly become visible when something familiar is about to disappear.

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I do not want to sentimentally romanticise the past or simply mourn its loss. Instead, I am interested in how progress and creation are shaped by what is fading as much as by what is remembered. Throughout my time at the house, I kept a drawer filled with small, random objects I had found while living there. Some of these objects are now embedded within the hedge in this work. I think of memories and stories much like objects: they come into contact, leave traces on one another, and are changed through their accumulation.




Harusari

Curated by Seongeun Lee 

Shown at Chamber Gallery in Seoul February 26nd to March 15th, 2026
The exhibition is themed around a central metaphor of the mayfly. Harusari, the Korean word for mayfly which also translates literally to “one day living thing” This work stems from the my childhood memories of growing up in a waterfront village in China. I recall collecting mayfly larvae from a stream and hiding them in a jar inside of a sock drawer. They one day transformed into adults and to my surprise flew away as I opened the drawer. I see the mayfly as a dialectical synthesis of both the past and present. The life of a mayfly; who spends virtually all of its life underwater only to emerge briefly as a “one day living thing;” resonates with my own experience moving to the UK at the age of seven. I don't see myself being either British or Chinese, I find comfort at the intersection of where these discordant experiences collide and mingle. 

I do not want to sentimentally romanticise the past or simply mourn its loss. Instead, I am interested in how progress and creation are shaped by what is fading as much as by what is remembered. Throughout my time at the house, I kept a drawer filled with small, random objects I had found while living there. Some of these objects are now embedded within the hedge in this work. I think of memories and stories much like objects: they come into contact, leave traces on one another, and are changed through their accumulation.




Stove by a Whale
is a collaboration between Steven He and Seongeun Lee curated by Jiayue He.        

Shown at Stafford St, London April 18th to May 5th, 2024 then at Moosey Gallery, London as a part of Occult Surge May 23rd to 25th      
In collaboration with artist Seongeun Lee, we draw inspiration from our different journeys as immigrants. Despite our contrasting approaches, we share an interest in the relationship between land and water, and how it reflects ideas of displacement, belonging and the search for home.

Together, we created a beach, a shifting landscape that exists somewhere between these two conditions. Land offers stability, structure and the possibility of putting down roots, but it also creates borders that separate us. The sea, by contrast, represents freedom, exploration and uncertainty, a place where movement is possible but nothing can be permanently built. The beach is a place where sandcastles can be built but are inevitably washed away, reflecting the experience of those who continually dream of settling but are never quite able to.
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The installation takes place in the aftermath of an implied encounter with a whale, which has left a boat shipwrecked on the shore. The wreck becomes a symbol of rupture, marking the loss of connections to an old community, but also the possibility of new beginnings. Destruction and displacement are not necessarily endings, but can become the conditions through which new relationships emerge.

Throughout the project, we collected objects through mudlarking and metal detecting, treating them as fragments of stories carried across time and place. I think of culture as something almost physical, capable of leaving impressions on other cultures while being changed in return. As we move between places, we bring our own memories, customs and histories with us. These become entangled with those of others, gradually forming new traditions and ways of belonging.

When we first constructed the installation, the islands appeared almost barren. Over the course of the exhibition, however, workshops with local communities brought new objects, colours and stories into the space. Slowly, the landscape began to take on a life of its own, shaped not only by us but by the people who passed through it.

We are interested in these places where the tides change and the ground is never quite firm. By creating a landscape suspended between land and sea, we invite visitors to imagine a space that belongs fully to neither, a border between two worlds where ideas of home, identity and belonging can be continually reshaped.




Goose tied to a well

Curated by Seongeun Lee  
    
Shown at Chamber Gallery in Seoul February 26 to March 15, 2026   

When I was a child, my family would buy a goose every year to be killed and eaten as part of our Lunar New Year's Eve meal, known as the Reunion Dinner. I remember feeling sad for the goose, watching it every day and counting down the days of the year, which would also coincide with its death.

My grandparents would always tie the goose beside the well in our garden. They were terrified that I might fall in and reminded me almost weekly to stay away from it. Their warnings only deepened my fascination. I would peer down into the darkness, trying to imagine what lay beyond the void. The well became a gateway between the conscious and unconscious, a passage into the unknown where my fears, desires and memories still reside.

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The village where I grew up was once a lively, bustling community, but it has stood largely abandoned for the past fifteen years. Plans to transform it into a tourist destination were halted midway through reconstruction after it gained heritage status, leaving the village suspended somewhere between preservation and erasure. Today, little remains beyond the hollow shells of houses and the wells scattered among them. Once part of everyday village life, these wells now seem to form an invisible network beneath the abandoned buildings, connecting the houses through underground currents of water, memory and information. While the village above has fallen silent, I imagine something continuing to flow beneath it, carrying traces of the lives that once occupied these spaces.




Cold Frame

Installation view at Royal College of Art Graduate Show, Studio Building Royal College of Art Howie Street, London, 2022 

The frame has been a recurring theme in my work. I often think of it as a way of giving an object psychological importance, much like the presence of a gallery itself. While frames were once gilded and celebrated, they have gradually become more minimal, retreating into the background while retaining the same power to suggest that something is worth looking at.

In previous works, I have used the size, material and shape of frames to give a physical presence to things we are supposed to feel but rarely acknowledge. I am interested in how spaces influence the way we perceive what is within them. Just as entering a temple encourages us to move and think in a particular way, the white walls of a gallery invite us to look more closely and analytically at the objects around us. Both spaces carry their own forms of symbolism and mythology, giving ordinary things a greater sense of significance.

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By giving the frame as much visual importance as the painting it contains, I wanted to draw attention to the routine and often overlooked activities of everyday life, allowing them the same solemnity and depth of meaning that we afford to art.

The painting itself presents an inverted relationship between ourselves and the world. Rather than looking outward from within ourselves, the surrounding world appears to wrap around the frame as something separate from us. I was thinking about moments in history when our understanding of our place in nature began to shift, from the emergence of agriculture to the first photographs of Earth taken from space. These moments mark changes in how we see ourselves, from being part of the natural world to imagining ourselves as something separate from it, capable of observing and shaping it from the outside.

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Two Dishes, United Under the Common Reality of Being

Installation view at Royal College of Art Graduate Show, Studio Building, Royal College of Art, Howie Street, London, 2022    
I am interested in how certain Asian philosophical traditions find beauty in things that are imperfect and temporary. While Western philosophy is often associated with reading and writing, there are traditions in the East where understanding is found through everyday activities, such as arranging stones, drinking tea or practising archery. Through repeating these seemingly ordinary actions, we begin to notice things that might otherwise go overlooked, finding meaning through the act of doing rather than simply thinking.

This piece was inspired by the philosopher Martin Heidegger and his ideas about our shared existence. He observed that we, the fish swimming in a tank and even the tank itself, are all part of the same world, connected by the simple fact that we exist together. I am interested in how this way of thinking might change our relationship with the things around us, encouraging us to look beyond ourselves and approach even the most ordinary objects with greater attention and care.



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